The climate survival game

If both the climate crisis and the pandemic have taught us one thing it is that we are mistaken if we believe, as Barbados PM Mia Mottley put it, that “national solutions can solve global problems.”

In other words, the best advice is to avoid self-delusion, after having conceded that there indeed exists an existential threat to our survival as a sovereign small island state. We cannot do this alone. A long view of history would speak of the decimation, through a variety of different circumstances, of grand empires occupying infinitely larger geographical spaces than ours.

Unfortunately, there are those who walk among us who don’t share such a belief. They emerge from the swamp of ignorance from time to time. This pandemic period is one example. But climate change scepticism is of more durable vintage and at the core is a lack of belief in science.

I have seen, for instance, social media challenges to the value of a T&T presence in Glasgow alongside key AOSIS and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) allies on the grounds of some kind of retreat from domestic reality.

Such doubt also exists in the pregnant silence of opinion-leaders fresh from campaigns of COVID denial, resistance to pandemic measures and tacit promotion of vaccine hesitancy. To them, climate change scepticism is not that remote a concept.

We would also do well to recognise unequal international status, whatever our grandiose self-assessment. The fact is, at the root of much of the discussions and negotiations in Glasgow today, are the disproportionate levels of victimisation involving the wealthy and powerful, as opposed to the small and the under-resourced.

These important differentials lie at the heart of some important but highly problematic instruments designed by the global community to mitigate further damage and deterioration in areas such as the Caribbean.

For example, access to climate financing is now linked, since the Paris Agreement of 2015, to nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to fighting climate change. Following a programme of serious work, an indicative version of this has been prepared by T&T and others for the current conference.

The G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rome ahead of Monday’s COP26 inaugural session however side-stepped key issues including a clear deadline for net zero carbon emissions, and basically agreed (having previously failed to do so) to raise US$100 billion to help fund mitigation efforts in countries such as ours. PM Mottley thinks this is far less than what is required or even possible.

The problem is continued delays in prompt action belie the fact that the processes of nature set in train, now undeniably through human activity, are already considered to be irreversible. The urgent goal of capping the rise in global temperatures to no more than 1.5% over current levels in order to “stay alive” is an increasingly unreachable target.

The existence of an Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) however indicates acceptance of the fact that we cannot do this on our own, and that there are fellow travellers in whom there exist key commonalities.

As co-author of a Caribbean journalism handbook on “the climate crisis”, I have also been warned of the “alarmist” impact of employment of the word “crisis.” Well, dear friends, if climate change does not constitute an unfolding crisis for countries that are small, surrounded by the ocean, and still engaged in finding feet of their own in the development process, then what is?

T&T/Jamaica scientist Dr Rebekah Shirley has offered a menu of subjects for consideration by the AOSIS community. On the front burner, she proposes, ought to be political efforts to prioritise negotiations on adaptation, loss, and damage; commitments for blended forms of adaptation finance; and consensus on a carbon market mechanism.

Countries such as ours also have a vested interest in moving the developed world from elaborately expressed commitment to action. However, there were mixed reviews out of Rome regarding the prospects for realisation of such goals. This made the working sessions in Glasgow far more worthy of attention than the impressive speeches.

My friend and ACM science advisor, Steve Maximay, often advises against deployment of the “we go dead” approach. But the science may well conclude that as small island states faltering in our aspirations for true sovereignty, extinction is actually not a figuratively remote scenario.